The Growth Vault

When users start struggling with a service or an app, they often get discouraged and stop using it entirely.

People don’t tend to continue using things they feel bad at.

For example, a user might stop playing a game if they’re stuck on a single level for many days.

But this struggle is a great opportunity to use personalization to retain users.

By providing personalized support—helpful tips, links to resources, or, in some cases, discounts on helpful upgrades—you can retain users who otherwise churn out of frustration.

You can automate this tactic based on event triggers specific to your service or app. A few examples:

• Mobile games: number of games / levels failed
• Dating apps: number of matches per user
• Educational apps / services: number of failed quizzes

Here’s how this personalization might play out:

The dating app Tinder could calculate the number of matches each user receives and then compare it against the average number of matches across all users. Then it could identify users receiving a relatively low number of matches and deliver personalized content like tips on how to improve their profile. Alternatively, it could offer a discount on an upgrade or special feature that could solve the frustration.

Providing support to struggling users ultimately motivates them to stay.

Most list posts (listicles) are utilitarian, boring, and easily copied by rivals.

They have titles like:

• The Top 10 DSLR Cameras
• The 5 Best CRM Products
• The Complete List of SEO Tools
• And so on

These types of posts may generate a ton of pageviews—but they rarely generate revenue (a common goal of listicles).

You can transform your listicles from generic, copycat content into unique, defensible, revenue-generating assets in five steps. Here's how.

1. Choose novel selection criteria. Most listicles are “Google research papers.” The writer searches a target keyword, skims the search engine results page (SERP), and grabs an assortment of popular things to include in their article. This isn’t effective since you’re recycling the same information as everyone else.

To differentiate your listicle and pique the reader's interest, you need a strong hook.

• Ditch the "best" qualifier and try something less common (e.g., Overlooked / Foundational / Overrated…)
• Target a specific reader or use case (e.g., X for Content Marketers / CMOs / Ad Specialists…)
• Pick a specific product trait (e.g., X Overlooked Browser-Based / Freemium / No Code…)

2. Surface your thought process. Even though you’re curating objective information, your writing still needs to persuade. You are the expert and your job is to persuade the reader that your list is worth trusting. To do that, share your thought process and selection criteria (why you chose what you chose).

• Why did you include it? "It's the most recommended…" or "It's the lowest-priced…"
• Why not other options? "We excluded apps that don't offer a free trial…"
• Is there something novel or unexpected about it? "Though not a conventional SEO tool, this AI content app offers the same keyword research data at a lower price."

3. Share personal experience to demonstrate credibility. Readers can tell when a writer doesn’t have firsthand experience. So even if your articles rank for their target keywords, readers won't trust your advice. If you want your listicles to convert readers, you need to prove to them that you have firsthand experience with the things you're writing about. Here are a few ways to do that.

• Take screenshots of software you're reviewing (any part that can't be accessed without logging in).
• Take your own product photos—even better if you include yourself in the photos.
• Share personal anecdotes about your experience that only a real user could have.

4. Lean on the experiences of others. If you can't experience the product or service firsthand, base your listicle on the experience of people who have. That means surveying and quoting audiences and synthesizing firsthand experiences from users.

• If you have access to a large audience (i.e., email list or social media following), survey them and share your research in the listicle.
• If you don't, interview a subject matter expert and share their insights to lend credibility to your list.

5. Make a single, opinionated recommendation. Listicles are meant to help readers make a decision. Most listicles are good at collecting things but usually go overboard with too many choices. This only makes it harder for the reader. Great listicles go out on a limb and make a strong recommendation. And readers trust it because it was written based on firsthand experience and clear selection criteria.

• For example, the product review site, Wirecutter, reviewed over 250 wine glasses and still managed to come up with a single final recommendation for its readership.

Can you guess which of these two headlines did better than the other?

• 2 reasons why the price of silver will rise steeply
• 2 reasons why the price of silver may rise steeply

You might expect the first to perform better because it’s bolder. It makes a definitive claim: the price of silver will rise.

But according to copywriter Gary Bencivenga, the headline that used “may” outperformed its counterpart by 200%.

Why?

The one-word difference qualifies the rest of the statement—it’s a condition telling readers that the claim being made isn’t 100% certain. So it feels more realistic. Even credible.

Here are some examples of how companies use conditional claims to build more trust:

• "A/B testing can transform your business—if you do it right” (headline on VentureBeat)
• “Zoom is probably the most well-received collaboration tool that we’ve seen...in 20 years.” (the first testimonial shown on Zoom’s homepage)
• “When it’s time to get granular regarding competitor traffic stats, the Top Pages report in Traffic Analytics is hard to beat.” (an announcement from Semrush)

Note the italicized phrases that create a condition—they ground the claims and make them feel more believable—they’re not absolute statements.

To build more trust with readers, try using* conditional claims in your own copywriting.

One easy way to do it: use an “if... then” statement. Define a clear requirement (if), and then write your promise (then).

*See what we did there? In most of our tactics and recommendations, we use conditional language—we can’t say with 100% certainty that growth will follow.

Repeat customers spend ~67% more than first-time buyers. And it costs 6-7x more to turn a new visitor into a customer than it does to retain an existing customer.

Improving retention can fix a leaky-bucket business, yet only 18% of companies focus on it.

To increase profitability and lower marketing costs, consider implementing the following four retention strategies.

1. Start a loyalty program. Loyalty programs incentivize customers to return to your site to buy, reengage with your product, and promote your product on your behalf.

Tools like Loyalty Lion or Smile.io can get you started.

Here are a few loyalty models to explore:

• Free newsletters: Encourage sharing in exchange for premium content or shoutouts.
• Paid newsletters: Reward your top advocates with comped subscriptions.
• B2B: Offer training, tools, and invitations to members-only events.
• Ecommerce: Create a tiered membership program that rewards customers with points, perks, or discounts. For example, Sephora's Beauty Insider has over 25 million members, and those members account for ~80% of Sephora's annual sales.

2. Collect feedback throughout the sales process. When implemented, customer feedback can help lower CAC, improve your marketing's effectiveness, and improve retention.

How to implement:

• Collect feedback from on-site forms, social media, email and post-purchase surveys, and heatmaps.
• Look for repeat questions and complaints about your product or website, as well as requests for new features and products. Apply the most common feedback.

3. Follow an omnichannel engagement strategy. Compared to single-channel marketing, an omnichannel approach can improve retention rates and engagement by 90%.

Quality engagement always starts with quality content. Here are a few ways to encourage omnichannel engagement via content and community:

• Reply to social media and blog comments.
• Host special events (webinars, workshops, AMAs, interviews).
• Start and maintain a well-organized Slack or Discord channel.
• Personalize email as much as possible.
• Involve your audience in content creation (crowdsourcing).

4. Provide exceptional customer support. Anticipate all the different ways someone might need support (see point #2), and implement as many as make sense for your business.

• Add a prominent live chat to your website that shows when your team is available and ready for questions.
• Create a well-organized knowledge database that lets customers search for answers themselves.
• Create and moderate a community forum that allows users to help each other.
• Write comprehensive blog posts addressing common issues and questions.
• Create video tutorials or educational courses about your product or service.

Keep track of what you learn, and make gradual changes that address your target audience's goals, pain points, and interests. Accomplish that, and you'll have no problem boosting your retention rate.

Check out this Patagonia ad:

(Image source: @dailyadcoffee)

Copywriter Jon Morrow defines power words as “persuasive, descriptive words that trigger a positive or negative emotional response. They can make us feel scared, encouraged, aroused, angry, greedy, safe, or curious.”

If you “sprinkle in a few, … you can transform dull, lifeless words into persuasive words that compel readers to take action.”

What’s remarkable about this ad from Patagonia isn’t that it uses power words. All great copywriting does.

The remarkable thing about it is that those power words tap into different emotions depending on the order you read them in.

Reading from top down, they cause anger and fear: screwed, it’s too late, we don’t trust anyone, we don’t have a choice.

From the bottom up, the emphasis changes entirely, to hope and encouragement: choice, livable, imagine, healthy future.

Brilliant.

The poem is followed by that kicker of a tagline: “Buy Less, Demand More.” That’s shocking from a retailer—and extremely affecting.

The takeaway? Appeal to your readers’ emotions. We tend to think of decision making as being connected to the rational part of our brain, but the opposite is true. Decision making is emotional.

Feelings dictate decisions. Emotional responses are why we share things that go viral, why we donate to causes, and why we buy what we buy (or don’t buy what we don’t need, in the case of Patagonia).

Refer back to Morrow’s list as you write your copy. Consider how your writing instills fear, encouragement, arousal, anger, greed, safety, or curiosity. If, instead of triggering a high-arousal emotion, it makes you feel merely content, a little bit sad, or just kind of bored, it’s time for a rewrite.

That Patagonia ad is one in a collection of the strongest copywriting examples we’ve come across. You can check out the full article here.

Referral programs have three phases of maturity. Understanding yours will help you maximize your referrals ROI.

• Phase 1: Test—when your referral program is starting out
• Phase 2: Prove—when you’re optimizing it
• Phase 3: Scale—when you’re growing and streamlining it

Phase 1: Test. The point of this phase is to test your referral program incentive as quickly and cheaply as possible. Iteration is the action, profitability is the goal.

Here’s what this phase might look like:

• Find your top 10-20% most engaged customers. Run a pilot with them by sending them individualized emails describing your referral program.
• Fulfill the incentives manually. Engage with new prospects 1:1 and learn from them.
• Refine your messaging, incentive, and process over time.

Spend time on this phase. Early-stage referral programs are not yet “set it and forget it.” Just like any other marketing channel, they must be actively monitored and improved before you start scaling up.

Test, then invest.

Phase 2: Prove. Once you find an incentive that converts and messaging that resonates, start removing friction from the process.

• Optimize the experience to make it as few clicks as possible (for the customer first, then the prospect, then your internal team). Start using low-cost automations for repetitive tasks.
• Continue to refine your messaging and learn from your new customers.

Phase 3: Scale. When your referral program is predictably generating prospects—and the economics still make sense—it’s time to invest in referral program software, like Rewardful, GrowSurf, or Referral Rock.

Create feedback loops so your referrers know their efforts are paying off. Even if their sharing doesn't yield a referral, seeing that their friend clicked and viewed is still encouraging (and might spur another referral).

Keep an eye on your economics to make sure customer acquisition cost (CAC) is comparable to your other acquisition channels. Monitor the quality of your prospects to keep out any fraudulent gaming of the program.

How much should you charge, and how should you charge (e.g., subscription, usage-based, flat rate)?

When establishing your business model and answering those questions, be sure to factor in friction.

Your product’s friction should align with your model’s friction. A low-friction product should have a low-friction business model. A high-friction product should typically have a higher-friction business model.

• A low-friction product is easy to use to accomplish a product’s job-to-be-done. It’s easy to get started in and stick with. Examples: TikTok, Gmail. Those have low model friction, too—they’re free. Free trials, freemium, or just plain free often align with simple products.
• A high-friction product has a more complex onboarding and use process. Experiencing full product value and forming a product habit take longer. Examples: Salesforce, Palantir. They have high model friction, too, such as higher pricing, add-ons, and variable pricing.

When product and model friction don’t align, there’s a risk that your product’s value won’t get realized, your unit economics (CAC and ARPU) won’t work, and growth potential will be stymied.

• Low product friction and high model friction: Not competitive. You’ll lose out to competitors who make it easier to pay or offer a more affordable solution. Because of the pricing barriers to entry, you’ll limit the number of users who experience your product’s job-to-be-done—and limit growth. Hypothetical example: if Instagram were to start charging a monthly fee.
• High product friction and low model friction: If you have a highly complex product, it probably can’t be learned during a free trial or freemium use. Users wouldn’t get the maximum value from your product. If you were to offer onboarding services to help free trialers get the most out of your product, your CAC would go up and could become unsustainable.

Because of the importance of aligning product and model friction, successful low-ARPU products tend to be low-friction (like social media apps), and successful high-ARPU products tend to be high-friction (like enterprise B2B SaaS).

Good creative is the biggest driver of ad success in a post-iOS 14 world.

Your ads need to resonate with your audience. No amount of sophisticated targeting or optimization tweaks will save your campaigns—that's what makes creative testing so crucial.

Here’s a look at Thesis’ creative testing methodology. Consider using it to find learnings faster and protect your core campaigns from creative flops.

Step 1. Use a simplified account structure. Three campaigns, 3-4 ad sets per campaign, with 3-6 live ads in each. The campaigns:

• Campaign 1: Creative testing. Isolate creative testing into a separate campaign to ensure live tests won't impact your core campaign performance. This also allows you to force spend to drive faster learnings and curb creative fatigue.
• Campaign 2: Prospecting. Move winners from your creative testing campaign into a separate prospecting campaign. This campaign contains only your best-performing ads.
• Campaign 3: Retargeting. Again, move winners from your testing campaign into a separate retargeting campaign. You can test the prospecting creative as is, only changing the specific offer or discount for your retargeting promotions.

Step 1a. Allocate ~20% of your budget to creative testing. Use your CPA target and this formula to calculate (approximate) starting daily spend:

• First, calculate your weekly budget by multiplying your target CPA by 50 (minimum weekly conversion threshold needed to exit the learning phase).
• Then, divide your calculated weekly budget by 7 to arrive at your daily budget.
• Here's a hypothetical example using a $35 CPA:
• $35 x 50 = $1750
• $1750 / 7 day = $250 daily budget

Step 2. Set up a creative test. Use broad targeting—it's the most scalable (and often the cheapest). Each creative concept gets its own separate ad set containing up to six variants.

Only test elements of the ad unit itself (e.g., ad formats, new images or videos, thumbnails, copy, or CTAs). Here's an example of a net-new video test:

• Create a new ad set for your video test.
• Choose one element to test. If the video is untested, start by testing different hooks or altering the first three seconds of footage.
• Launch test.

Step 3. Run creative tests for at least three days, then make a call. After about three days of running a new test, you'll typically run into one of the following scenarios:

• Results are excellent: CPA is lower than average. At least 1-2 variants show signs of traction. Start scaling spend by ~20% every three days directly in the creative testing campaign. If you have the budget, you can increase spend by 50%-100% to drive learnings even faster.
• Duplicate the winning ad into your core prospecting and retargeting campaigns.
• Results are average: Only a few purchases are generated, falling within 10%-20% of your CPA targets. Start optimizing at the ad level and turn off worst performers to give other ads more spend.
• If an ad reaches 2X your average CPA without a purchase, turn it off.
• If no winners are found in the test after 5-7 days, turn off the ad set.
• Results are bad: CPAs are high (2X normal or greater) across the board, engagement rate is poor, and there are little to no purchases generated from the new creative test.
• Follow the same optimization process from the previous bullet point.

Don’t turn off any ad set that's performing well during your creative tests. Keep it running in your testing campaign as long as results remain strong.

If you have an ecommerce site, best practice is to keep your menu (navbar) as simple as possible.

That’s not to say that every ecommerce brand should remove its informational pages—e.g., blog, About Us, FAQ—from their menu. For some, those links will help conversion, not hinder it.

A general rule of thumb for you to consider:

• If your brand has a relatively low average order value and you’re not selling a complex, ultra-specialized, or mission-driven product, move your informational pages and blog out of your menu and into your footer.
• For higher-priced, sophisticated, or story-oriented products, content marketing and info pages could increase conversion. These can factor into the consideration, intent, and evaluation stages of a buyer’s journey. Your navbar might be a good place for them.

Examples: Allbirds has a page about sustainability in its navbar. That's a core value that many shoppers will connect with and support. Judy puts FAQs in its navbar, since the decision to buy a disaster prep kit brings a lot of questions with it. On the other hand, the navbars for Nomatic and Clevertify focus on their relatively straightforward products (backpacks and baby clothes).

This boils down to a simple question to ask about any page: Will it help prospects convert or distract them from converting?

When it’s done right, cold email is one of the highest ROI activities for growing your business. In fact, good cold emails get response rates between 2% and 10%—and even better ones get rates above 40%.

Here's the framework we use to write emails of the latter caliber:

• Opening line: Your first sentence must grab attention. Since it also appears as your email’s preview text in the inbox, your goal is to intrigue readers enough to open your email. We recommend personalizing this line so it doesn’t read like the other poorly written cold emails people get in their inboxes.
  
• Context: Why you’re reaching out. For instance, because you noticed that the recipient is using a particular tool and might have a certain pain point. The more specific, the better. This is also a good place for a quick intro.
  
• Value proposition: How you offer value. Don’t be salesy. Focus on describing your product’s benefits rather than its specific features. If true, highlight the fact that your product genuinely solves a problem for your recipient better than an alternative they’re already using.
  
• Wrap-up: One clear call to action. If this is your first email, ask for someone’s interest instead of their time. “Think we might be a good fit?" works better than “Let’s book a call” since replying “yes” is lower friction than immediately booking a call with a stranger.

Note that it’s not enough to just write one email in hopes of reaching your target audience. Write multiple—test different opening lines, value props, etc. Create different versions to experiment with.

For inspiration, take a look at this cold email that uses this exact formula:

Read more about sending better cold emails here.

In a survey of ~600 SaaS companies, nearly half (45%) had usage-based pricing in 2021— that’s up from 27% in 2018.

What is usage-based pricing? It’s charging for customers’ use of or transactions with your product. The more they use it, the more they pay.

Examples:

• SendGrid users pay for emails/month.
• HubSpot users pay for marketing contacts.
• Wistia users pay for videos or podcast episodes.

Usage-based pricing is generally considered the SaaS gold standard. When you align your pricing with product value, users stick around. They came to your product because of the value it offers, and they’ll stay if they’re paying for what they’re getting out of it.

If usage-based pricing is right for your business, the first step is to figure out what you’d charge for—what your value metric should be (like “marketing contacts” for HubSpot). Here’s an abbreviated version of a framework for that process:

1. Define your job-to-be-done: what it is your customers “hire” your product/service to do. Example for a language-learning app: “self-paced language learning.”
2. Convert your JTBD into proxies. Examples for the language-learning app: courses taken, live classes scheduled, test score improvement.
3. Answer these questions for each proxy: Does it align with customers’ needs? Is it scalable? Is it clear? Does it make sense as a way to acquire and retain customers? Do price and value scale proportionately?
4. If any of your proxies have all “yes” responses to the above questions, include them in a customer survey. Use max-differential sets to find the right feature for your value metric. These force respondents to pick the most and least important item from a list, helping to identify what your audience truly values (and they’re available in survey platforms like SurveyKing).

We get much more in-depth with this framework in our Growth Program’s pricing module, where we also help you determine whether usage-based pricing is right for your startup. But these four steps provide an overview of the customer-first approach you should take with usage-based pricing.

Product seeding is the act of sending your product to influencers so they'll promote it to their audiences—organically. Some call it gifting.

Most brands approach seeding by immediately pushing contracts or content obligations on influencers.

We advise taking a more hands-off approach instead. That is, identify relevant influencers that align with your brand. Send out your product and make it clear there are no strings attached. Then see which influencers create content about your product without being asked. Use a tool like Archive or MightyScout to track influencer stories and posts that mention your brand.

Product seeding has three major benefits:

1. It has a higher potential ROI than traditional influencer marketing, which often requires a large upfront investment. Though product seeding means giving away your product for free, organic exposure from just one influencer can quickly offset this cost.
   
2. It identifies influencers who genuinely love your product—creating the perfect foundation for an effective, long-term, and mutually beneficial relationship. Example: After the Rowing Blazers team got word that Pete Davidson was wearing their apparel, they reached out for a collab—and got a very enthusiastic response.
   
3. You can easily repurpose this user-generated content for other channels, like ads. This is where serious growth comes in. You can get loads of high-quality, influencer-generated content, for free, from genuine product adopters. Taylor Lagace scaled Animal House Fitness from 0 to $1M in 4 months by using this seeding and ad approach.

We’d recommend seeding micro-influencers (those with under 50k followers). Big-time influencers who create for a living expect to get paid for their work upfront, whereas smaller influencers might appreciate the free product. For more insights on influencers, check out our creator marketing playbook.

There are two main signals Google’s algorithm looks at to rank your pages:

• The types of sites linking to you: What are they? And how big, relevant, and authoritative are they? These are backlinks.
• Your internal link structure: How are you linking pages together? Does your link structure enable productive link flow?

Most marketers over-fixate on backlinks, when they should be paying more attention to internal link structure.

Think of your website as an electrical circuit:

• Backlinks supply energy to the circuit in the form of electrical current (link flow).
• Each page functions as a component of the circuit board.
• Unless each component is calibrated and strung together just right, electrical current won't flow, and the circuit won't function.

To get the most benefit from backlinks, link up your pages in a way that distributes link flow productively throughout your website.

Here are two ways to do it:

• Distribute link flow to high–search value pages. Every internal link you create sends a signal to Google that you think that page is important.
• Your “About us” page may be valuable to you and your site visitors, but if that page has no search value, you’re sending Google the wrong message by linking to it internally.
• As a rule of thumb, remove these links where possible, especially if they’re repeated often. Then prioritize creating links to key pages that are better optimized for search. Think: valuable blog posts and pages that are designed to convert.
• Avoid linking to weak or duplicate content.
• Duplicate content tells search engines that your site has poor content quality. Linking to these pages only adds insult to injury. Apart from your header and footer, make sure your pages share less than ~50% of the same words.
• Pages that are considered “weak” in Google’s eyes typically have low word counts and little information. Think: all the short, half-hearted blog posts of the internet—abundant in quantity, but never quality. To make your link flow more productive, avoid linking to these pages (better yet, avoid having them altogether).

After The Hustle published an article about Hint Water, the flavored water company saw their CPC drop from ~$5 to < 10¢. Their cost to acquire customers dropped from $80 to $25.

(Source: Nik Sharma during our Growth Summit. That’s an unlisted video, just for DC readers.)

We view PR as an “unscalable channel.” It can help you get traction, but growth won’t compound as you put more resources behind it.

But that doesn’t mean a single media hit can’t cause growth to skyrocket. Think of it as performance PR: using media to earn revenue.

Here are three ways to increase your chances of getting viral PR:

1. Run social media ads to your target demographic within a specific location: where editors who cover your industry are. Then reach out to those editors. People view the things they’re familiar with as better. Editors are more likely to respond since they’ll already be familiar with your company because of your ads.
2. Pretty much all major media companies are on affiliate platforms. To increase your chances of media traction, join one of those platforms (like Impact, Skimlinks, or ShareASale)—especially if you’re DTC. A higher affiliate percentage usually ups the likelihood of a mention.
3. As Bell Curve’s growth strategist Stephanie Jiang puts it, “Media drives media.” Put ad spend behind existing media mentions. They have third-party validation, which carries more weight than a company talking about itself.

Loyalty programs can feel like a nice-to-have, so plenty of brands brush them off.

But building an email-based loyalty program for your best customers could have an incredibly high ROI—trade a few hours of work for a steady stream of revenue.

Here’s an example.

Rejoiner, an email marketing platform for ecommerce brands, built a quick loyalty program for their client Peak Design.

The results are incredible. The program has generated $46.8k in added revenue over the last 90 days—with an 11.6% click-through rate. And it took just six total work hours to build.

Here’s how they pulled it off (and our take so you can replicate the strategy).

Step 1: Rejoiner created two loyalty offers based on Peak’s purchase history:

• Customers who’ve spent over $500 get $20 off their next purchase of $100+.
• Those who’ve spent $1,000 get $40 off their next purchase of $200+.

Our take: Don’t overthink your loyalty segments and offer. Consider targeting the top ~10% of your customers by spend—no need to get too methodical here. Provide an offer that’s materially valuable and test it. You can optimize the offer and segments later.

Step 2: Rejoiner created an email that combines personalized copy with CRO best practices (like the big red button). It feels personal but gets straight to the point.

Clean, simple, effective. The result: 8% of recipients make a purchase.

Our take: Customers know that the emails they receive from brands are automated. When you’re writing your email, show there’s a human behind the copy. The Peak Design email feels like it’s coming from a friend. And use “I” instead of “we”—“I” feels more emotionally involved, and studies show that it leads to more purchases.

Step 3: Rejoiner used a unique discount code. A generic discount code like “VIP_10_OFF” would quickly kill the magic the personalization created.

Plenty of apps make it easy to generate randomized discount codes (here’s one for Shopify brands). And most of these apps integrate with email marketing platforms, so you can send each subscriber a unique code.

Bottom line: A simple, thoughtful email loyalty program can be an engine for incremental revenue.

Most companies that pursue SEO default to using keyword difficulty and search traffic to determine which keywords to target. They simply prioritize keywords that aren’t too competitive to rank for and regularly receive moderate to high search traffic.

But Ahrefs adds another layer to their research. Besides search traffic and difficulty, the Ahrefs team also uses an internal metric they call “Business Score.”

Business Score is a subjective rating measured on a scale from 0 to 3 and based on each keyword or potential topic’s relation to Ahrefs’ product.

• 0: The keyword can’t be tied to Ahrefs’ product.
• 1: Ahrefs provides only a partial solution.
• 2: Ahrefs provides a solution, but other tools solve the problem just as well.
• 3: Ahrefs’ product is an irreplaceable solution for the keyword.

For instance, a topic like “backlink analysis” ranks 3 while “email outreach" ranks 1—Ahrefs can help with finding companies to reach out to but it isn’t an all-encompassing solution for email outreach.

Ahrefs prioritizes keywords with a higher Business Score, using this metric to understand each keyword’s business value. Since they don’t make a compelling case for users to invest in Ahrefs, topics with a low Business Score are low-priority.

If you’re pursuing SEO, consider including Business Score in your keyword research. This metric will save you from creating content about topics that are relatively easy to rank for but don’t drive people into your product.

Every piece of copy is unique.

Yet no matter the situation, the same mistakes seem to show up over and over again.

At least that's what Neville Medhora, founder of Copywriting Course, observed after answering over 20k questions from his students.

Here are 8 of the most common copy mistakes, with solutions to quickly solve them:

Mistake #1: Putting too many CTAs on a page or email

• Why it's bad: Including too many CTAs causes each of them to compete against one another (e.g., Join, Click, Buy, Read More). This dilutes your message and leads to decision fatigue—both of which hurt conversion. And especially in email, once a reader clicks a link, they're unlikely to come back and click anything else.
• Quick fix and result: Pick one CTA and write your copy for that specific action. Your messaging and conversion should be stronger.

Mistake #2: Using too many buzzwords or jargon

• Why it's bad: Buzzwords are vague and confusing. Jargon is usually too specific for most audiences, which is also confusing. Neither one clearly tells the reader about your product or how it benefits them. This makes it a chore to read and hurts conversion.
• Quick fix and result: Replace buzzwords and jargon with direct, simple language that a 5th grader could understand. You'll help readers value your offer.

Mistake #3: Busy pages with bad layouts

• Why it's bad: Crowded pages are bad UX. They're tough to read and distract from the copy—the most important part.
• Quick fix and result: Make the simplest possible page layout and use negative space to your advantage. That means simple words, distraction-free layouts that emphasize those words, and short, concise explanations to get the message across. People will be more likely to read your copy and take action.

Mistake #4: New writers trying to copy content from major blogs

• Why it's bad: Major blogs tend to write about the same broad and stale topics over and over again. Articles like, "how to start a business" or "complete guide to losing weight." This usually makes for mediocre content that isn't very useful.
• Quick fix and result: Instead of writing for the masses about the same broad topics that have been covered ad nauseam, write about the specific problems your product aims to solve. Your content will resonate more if you include personal stories from experience, anecdotes, and interviews. This gives your content personality, a memorable human element.

Mistake #5: Subheadings that don't guide the reader through an article

• Why it's bad: Most people skim through content to get the gist from subheadings. Bland subheadings make your content hard to scan, and many readers will just bounce.
• Quick fix and result: Tell the story of your content using descriptive subheadings. Your content will be more engaging, and more readers will stick around to read the full article. And readers who just want to skim will still get value from the subheadings alone.

Mistake #6: Writing "How To" content without giving practical actions

• Why it's bad: When your content fails to give readers practical actions to take, it doesn't actually help the reader. It's also forgettable—if there's no action to take, the reader probably won't remember your advice.
• Quick fix and result: Include at least one actionable takeaway in every section of your article. This makes for better content, happier readers, and actionable content is much more likely to get shared.

Mistake #7: Awkward cold emails with bad intros

• Why it's bad: Gimmicky, insincere email intros are guaranteed to turn the reader off immediately. They probably won't read past the intro, and they definitely won't convert. They may even dislike you and delete your email.
• Quick fix and result: Write the email as if you're speaking to a friend. Be direct and concise, don't pitch them upfront, and state a simple, obvious reason for why you're emailing them in the first place (e.g., "I saw that we're in the same Slack group and wanted to reach out"). Have a legitimate reason for reaching out. You'll build better relationships and more conversions that way.
• Note: We cover how to write a cold email in detail here.

Mistake #8: Overthinking email style and format

• Why it's bad: When you only write one draft, you don’t have anything to test, you get stuck on design instead of conversions, and you put yourself under a lot of pressure to get it right on the first try.
• Quick fix and result: When testing different formats, write three versions: one short, one medium, and one long. That way, you'll move quicker because there’s less pressure and more creative freedom, and you’ll have extra versions to test. In the long run, this will help you land on a style and format that resonates most with your audience.

Check out Neville's full post which has helpful visual examples.

All eyes are on TikTok as the next big opportunity in paid social.

TikTok is unsaturated—competition is low and traffic is affordable. And its userbase is snowballing across audiences worldwide.

But is now the right time for you to test TikTok ads as a new ad channel? Before you launch into testing, consider these questions:

1. Can you commit the budget to test TikTok ads properly? Every new channel has a cost of entry, and you have to spend to learn. We recommend setting aside 10% - 30% of your ad budget to test this channel properly. It’ll likely take 6-10 weeks to test and validate TikTok as a paid acquisition channel.
2. Does TikTok align with your product? TikTok ads perform well for DTC ecom brands and mobile apps. DTC ecom brands selling visual products with broad appeal, short sales cycles, and AOVs between $25 - $100 tend to get the most out of TikTok. Similarly, mobile apps and games work well since free app installs are low-friction. TikTok ads can work for many other types of products, but consider how your product aligns with the channel before testing.
3. Do you have the capacity to focus on TikTok as a separate channel in your ad mix? TikTok is an entirely different beast than Facebook. To give TikTok ads a fair shot, you'll need to invest resources into producing a high volume of channel-specific creatives that you can test diligently. Whether you make them yourself or partner with content creators, having a high volume of creatives ready to go is essential.
4. Have you seen success with Snapchat ads, IG Reels, or IG Stories? If you've had success with any of these channels and want to diversify, TikTok is a logical next step. TikTok can have cheaper CPAs, cheaper CPMs, and higher quality traffic than Snapchat or Instagram. You can try repurposing Snapchat/IG assets because these types of ads are typically vertical UGC videos, precisely the kind of content that performs best on TikTok. And if you have the original video content, even better. You can cut new ads, making full use of TikTok's audiovisual publishing tools to achieve the right aesthetic.

If you answered 'yes' to all four questions, TikTok ads might be worth testing now.

If not, and you're still interested in experimenting with TikTok, consider experimenting with an organic TikTok strategy before you dive into ads.

Hiring for SEO positions is a notoriously difficult and time-consuming process.

Unless you're an SEO expert yourself, you likely lack the domain knowledge needed to properly vet candidates and entrust them to deliver results. And SEO is an investment—results often take 6-12 months. That requires massive trust in who you hire.

So, if you're thinking about hiring an SEO operator and don't have the time to brush up on technicals or source a trusted referral, use these sample interview questions to help expedite the interview process and find a qualified candidate:

• How do you check whether a URL is indexed by Google? Every operator should know the site: command. This displays all indexed pages in the SERPs.
• How do you block a URL from being indexed? This question is meant to see if they actually know the purpose of a no-index tag and don't confuse it with blocking a page in robots.txt. The former tells Google not to index a page while keeping it in the sitemap. The latter keeps pages out of Google's index completely.
• What are the most important SEO ranking factors, in your opinion? No definitive answer here. Listen to their perspective and see if they can explain how multiple ranking factors contribute to overall rankings. A good candidate will:
• Back up their answers with data and relevant experiences.
• Have on-the-job examples to share.
• Avoid absolute statements and not be afraid to say "it depends" (SEO is nuanced and case-specific).
• What SEO myths have you had enough of? Only an experienced SEO should be able to answer this question. Ask them to elaborate on their favorite SEO myths and how they navigate them in their work. Their answer should provide insight into their learnings and strategy—the development of their process.
• What are some quick technical SEO wins? No right answer here, but you want to see if they can differentiate between and prioritize low-impact, high-impact, low-effort, and high-effort optimizations.
• For example, compressing images and deleting thin content are low-effort, high-impact actions. Optimizing meta descriptions on blog posts is a high-effort, low-impact one.
• A site that's been online for 9 months is getting zero traffic. Why? There are a million reasons why an established site might not be getting traffic. They should be able to offer several possible scenarios—with solutions—that illustrate why that is. This question is meant to explore their ability to problem-solve, think critically, and be creative—all requisite SEO skills.
• How do you perform a technical SEO audit? Like the last question, there are many ways to skin a cat. The point of this one is to check if they have a process in place for auditing a website. Some follow-up questions:
• What tools do they use and how do they use them?
• What are the first things they look for in an audit, and why?
• How have they resolved particular issues and what were the results?

Bonus: Ask the candidate to explain their SEO strategy in a way a child could easily understand. This is harder than it sounds, but if they can get the point across without all the jargon and technical mumbo jumbo, that's a good sign they know their stuff.

Check out the article for the full list of questions.

Consumers now have a sixth sense for inauthenticity. We can tell when a brand is jumping on a bandwagon just because it’s the trendy thing to do, or when they’re saying all the right things but not following through with all the right actions.

How can you overcome consumer distrust? Two possibilities are to talk about your competitors and share bad reviews.

It sounds illogical. But by talking about competitors and bad reviews, you'll:

• Create a warmer brand perception. Transparency and authenticity increase brand trust.
• Surprise seen-it-all-before consumers. Most brands talk about themselves (and only in a positive light). Acknowledging competitors and addressing bad reviews is novel.
• Overcome key objections, like they’re not as good as x competitor or any concerns that often come up in negative reviews. Praising competitors might increase perceptions of competence, and addressing bad reviews is a direct way to dispel whatever objections are discussed in them.

Talk about your competitors. In a series of Facebook ads for a fictional car wash company, an ad that praised a competitor got a 5.4% click-through rate (“Precision Car Wash congratulates LikeNew Car Wash. Our fiercest competitor and the Industry Best 2020 Award recipient!”).

Compare that to a 3.3% CTR for a self-promotional ad (“Precision Car Wash is proud to receive the Industry Best 2020 Award”) and 1.8% for an ad with a third-party endorsement (“The Industry Best 2020 Award committee is proud to announce Precision Car Wash as this year’s Best 2020 Award recipient”).

Praising a competitor seems risky and unlikely. When a brand does it successfully, they come across as genuine. And sincerity is skepticism’s biggest foe.

Share bad reviews. Peloton did this earlier this year with ads featuring negative comments like “overpriced coat rack”—followed by praise from those same people a few years later.

If you share bad reviews, balance them with positives like Peloton did. Prove that either 1) the criticism is no longer valid or 2) it was never justified to begin with.

Don’t overdo either of these tactics, or it could start to backfire. Always keep copy fresh and authentic.

Roughly 50% of Twitter engagement happens within the first hour of posting.

This means apart from creating interesting social content, timing is crucial for getting your tweet seen.

And according to an analysis of more than 7.6 million Twitter likes and 139,000 follows, you should decide when to post your content based on the type of content you post.

In short:

• Post in the morning if your content is educational in nature.
• This includes how-to guides and business/science news.
• Example: Much of the New York Times’ tweets
• Post in the evening or late afternoon if your content provides immediate gratification.
• This includes memes, celebrity gossip, food pics, and promotional offers, like a flash sale.
• Examples: Entertainment Weekly, McDonald’s

Your Twitter posts are more likely to get higher engagement if you follow this pattern. In fact, this trend even applies on weekends, and to subjects that aren’t relevant to work.

Researchers suspect that this is because our self-control declines over the course of the day—making us prefer more immediately gratifying content in the evening.

To plan your Twitter posts accordingly:

• Categorize your content into two types: educational and entertaining.
• Schedule educational posts to go live before 4 pm and entertaining posts for after this point.
• If you primarily focus on one category of content, adjust your publishing time accordingly.
• Consider experimenting with the timing of your content on other channels, e.g., Facebook, Instagram, even email.

Marketing on TikTok remains an untamed beast for most businesses. The creative requirements are incredibly steep and specific compared to those of other social ad channels.

To get started on the right track, follow these helpful starter strategies:

1. < 1-second thumbstop. TikTok and Instagram Reels have drastically shortened attention spans. You might have a 3-second window to grab someone's attention on Facebook. On TikTok, you only have one second. Design your ads assuming people will only see the first thumbnail. And use catchy headlines and audio to reel them in.
2. Showcase the end-state first. Arrange your creative in reverse chronological order; open your video with the benefit to the customer and showcase the end result. Then show how they got to that end result thanks to your product.
3. Mimic organic product discovery content. Ecommerce products get discovered on TikTok via "digital" word-of-mouth marketing (i.e., everyday people gushing over remarkable product finds, completely organic). To tap into this existing user behavior, design your ecommerce ads to mimic hashtag trends like "TikTok made me buy it" or "things I found on the internet."
4. Authenticity is key. Well-produced, airbrushed content doesn't fly on TikTok. Users value authenticity. Two ways to make your ads more authentic: a) entertain viewers with an earnest performance, like a comedy skit, and integrate your product, seamlessly or b) educate via product demonstration and a believable, emotional reaction of someone experiencing the benefits.
5. Install the TikTok pixel. TikTok needs a lot of data to optimize your ads. Even if you aren't ready to experiment with ads yet, consider installing the pixel now so it'll be ready when you are. This will give you better targeting and ad optimization from day one.
6. Set up an MVP brand profile. Establish an organic brand profile before launching ads to test content types and find your audience. Virality potential is high and feedback, immediate, so if you create quality content, TikTok's algo will find an audience. Once you iterate towards a formula that works, use engagement and video view data for targeting and lookalikes in your ads.
7. Always-on creative testing. Ads fatigue faster on TikTok than any other ads platform. To stay ahead of the curve, set up an always-on creative testing campaign in your ad account. Inject new creatives tests on a weekly basis, and move winners into a dedicated prospecting campaign with your top-performers. Rinse and repeat.
8. Leverage trending audio and video syles. Don't make ads. Make TikToks. Utilize trending audio or video effects in every video you produce. The more organic, the better. Also, use captioning and voice-over to reinforce your core message and help keep viewers engaged.

TikTok got more traffic than Google last year (source: Cloudflare).

That sentence has a ton of implications for marketers. Here’s one: Search might start getting much more visual.

Imagine a truly multimedia search engine, with visual queries, data, and results. It would align more with our TikTok-Instagram world than hyperlinks and text. We’re not there yet, but Google’s making progress with initiatives like its Multitask Unified Model system, which could one day respond to a photo of hiking boots with feedback on whether they’re suitable for a hike up Mt. Fuji.

In the meantime, we already have visual recognition technology like Google Lens and Bing Visual Search. And they’re already advanced. Just snap a pic and get relevant search results.

To optimize for a visual-search world:

• Make sure your pages pass Google’s mobile-friendly test. Pretty much all Google Lens searches are done on mobile.
• Add descriptive image file names and alt text wherever they’re missing from your content.
• Visual search is yet another reason to optimize your site content as a whole. High-authority pages and sites are more likely to appear in Google Lens results.
• Keep creating high-quality written content. Brian Dean found that the pages Google Lens pulls image results from have an average 1,631 words of text. That text provides context, helping Google Lens do its job.
• Visual search could increase brand exposure. E.g., someone takes a picture of a competing product → your logo’ed product appears in results. Consider adding branding to items that don’t have it.

Most growth marketers are familiar with the following:

• Say-do gap: when customers say one thing during interviews/surveys, then do another
• Referral gap: when customers say they’d be comfortable giving a referral, but don’t
• Creepiness ditch: the void where personalization starts to feel creepy, resulting in fewer conversions, not more

Here’s another one: the gap between site browsing and adding products to cart. Aka the browse-cart gap.

It’s a pretty big deal. Salecycle found that 43.8% of retailer site sessions include product page views, but only 14.5% result in add-to-carts.

One way to reduce the gap? Browse-abandonment emails. They’re a form of retargeting that aren’t as common as cart-abandonment emails—even though compared to traditional emails, they have a 50.5% higher click-through rate and 80.9% higher open rate.

• Use browse-abandonment emails to remind site visitors of what they were looking at. Feature product images, and make it easy to get back to browsing with high-contrast CTAs. This is a good space for overcoming objections—you could highlight free shipping or your easy return policy—and sharing social proof, like customer reviews.
• Consider that visitors might have decided against the products they were viewing, so open up the playing field. Showcase other products that might draw them back in. These could include best-sellers or products that are relevant to viewed product pages or past purchase history.

As with all email, you should segment and personalize. You’ll only be able to retarget people who are already on your email list, and while that’s limiting, it does mean stronger brand interest and possibly higher intent. Take advantage of that to close the gap and the sale.

In-cart cross-sells can boost AOV.

But only if the products you’re featuring are relevant to the items already in your customers’ carts.

A Baymard study found that 52% of sites recommend products that are either completely irrelevant or based only on what other customers bought.

In 2022, most people expect a personalized online shopping experience, which is why irrelevant cross-sells rarely work. And worse, they erode users’ confidence in your site and business—dragging down your AOV.

If cross-selling is part of your ecom strategy, consider these 6 tactics to help improve take rate and AOV:

1. Avoid listing a fixed number of products: One highly relevant suggestion that stands alone will get more attention than if it’s buried amongst four irrelevant suggestions. For example, If someone is buying a computer mouse, only show them the batteries they'll need, not batteries plus a random selection of office supplies just to fill up space.
2. Be cautious about listing alternative products: Introducing alternative products during checkout can cause the customer to second-guess their decision, consider other options, and abandon the checkout process—the last thing you want. Products that complement the item in the cart should be shown over alternative products. For example, if someone is ready to buy a pair of AirPods, don't recommend a headset from Bose or Beats by Dre.
3. Use labels to define the context: If you want to present a cross-sell but don't have a high relevance product, consider using labels like "Inspired by Your Browsing History," "Frequently Bought Together," or "Other Products in This Collection." Users will be less dismissive of questionable product recommendations if you simply give them a reason.
4. Prioritize products of the same use case or theme: Giving priority to products of the same use case or theme can prevent seemingly unrelated items from being displayed. For example, cross-sell sections with labels like "Winter Essentials", or "Back to School" allow sites to make reasonable suggestions as long as they're thematically related.
5. Feature products that customers need to get started: Some examples: A toy that requires batteries to operate, a mobile phone with specific dimensions for a protective case, or a camera needing a particular memory card type.

If you’re building a brand, you need quality assets. Think, photo and video for your site, social channels, ads you might run, and the content you create.

Here’s an effective workaround for brands looking for a fast, inexpensive way to source the top three types of quality creative assets you need using vendors.

• Product shots. Use Soona for a quality virtual shoot. Simply choose what types of shots you’re looking for, provide details, and ship your products. You’ll live chat with your photographer so you can make sure you get the shots you need. And you should have finished assets in about 2 weeks.
• High-quality stock video. Use Social Motion Packs for beautiful video content. You can buy individual content packs or a subscription to their library.
• UGC. Use Billo to source talent. Spec out exactly what type of UGC you want. Creators will apply for your project and you choose those who best fit your brand. Send them products. Approve their content as they submit.

Pencil used this process and sourced loads of quality content for their brand ... at a cost of $343.

Most content marketers know how to use Ahrefs for keyword research, backlink research, and site analysis.

But there are other powerful ways you can use Ahrefs that many marketers don’t know about. If you’re working in content marketing, consider trying these three tactics:

• Size your market. Using Keyword Explorer, look up your target keyword. Then click on the three dots in the corner of the Volume box and click “Export as CSV.” The CSV file shows how the volume of your target keyword has fluctuated over the last 5+ years. This will help you figure out whether your market is shrinking or expanding—which is nice to know before you invest in creating content for that keyword.
• Define your content clusters. When your keyword research turns up a group of similar or related keywords, it’s hard to decide how exactly to structure your pillar page. For guidance, enter these keywords into Keyword Explorer. Then in the sidebar, click “Traffic Share By Pages.” Look at the page that ranks for the most keywords you entered and earns the largest share of traffic—you can take notes on page structure, depth, and topics to use for your pillar page.
• Build links from pages with greater traffic potential. Avoid simply judging link-building targets based on their domain rating (or another authority score)—most of these scores matter less than they did years ago. Instead, prioritize building links from sites that drive more traffic. To do this, look up the URL of a competitor page that ranks for your target keyword in Site Explorer. Go to Backlinks and sort by page traffic. The top referring pages that drive the most traffic are the sites you should prioritize getting a link from, regardless of their domain rating.

Many B2B and consumer SaaS startups create free resource templates for their target audience to use with the goal of nurturing them into paying customers.

They tend to offer these templates as part of a blog post. For example, an email service provider might provide cold email templates as part of a guide to cold outreach.

This SEO strategy is a great way to attract visitors—but you can get even more from it by creating standalone landing pages for each of your resources. Hypercontext, an employee engagement app, did exactly this by creating separate landing pages for each of its 60+ meeting templates. The result was a 51% organic traffic boost in just three months.

To be clear, Hypercontext still includes its templates in some of its blog posts. For example, it’s published:

• 4 things to include in your daily scrum meeting agenda [Template]: A blog post giving best practices about planning scrum meetings
• Scrum Team Meeting Template: A landing page where users can immediately access Hypercontext’s free template

To avoid keyword cannibalization, Hypercontext focuses its blog posts on other relevant info not provided in its templates. Meanwhile, it keeps its template pages very short and to the point.

Why does this strategy work? The standalone pages grab more long-tail template-related keywords than a blog post might. And since users searching specifically for templates usually have more of a transactional intent (and likely less interest in reading a long blog post), your standalone template pages actually better satisfy user intent.

Common marketing wisdom tells us that on-site user reviews are a great form of social proof for converting prospects.

This is generally true. But for DTC ecom brands, you might be collecting and displaying your reviews in the wrong place.

Research shows that users spend little time looking at DTC site-provided reviews—they believe these reviews have a higher likelihood of being manipulated.

Users would rather look at external reviews on Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, or another third-party source.

So if you’re a DTC ecom brand, rather than focus on gathering on-site reviews, consider these tactics:

• Encourage customers to review your product on third-party sites. Since shoppers perceive reviews on third-party review sites as being less biased, you’ll get more ROI from these reviews than ones on your own site.
• Feature user-generated social media content instead. People trust reviews from your users on social media more than the reviews on your site. The logic: If people are willing to speak positively about a product on social media for their followers to see, then the brand can be trusted. So you can embed social media posts from real users directly on your site, as opposed to reviews, and come off as more authentic.
• Prioritize influencer marketing. This is a more involved approach to reviews—you can give micro-influencers your product for free in exchange for honest reviews. People turn to influencers for recommendations. Lean into a source they already trust. To go deep on influencer strategy, check out our influencer marketing playbook.

If you’ve already invested in getting reviews on your site:

• Make it easy to sort and filter them. Otherwise, users will further perceive your site as being manipulative in the kinds of reviews it features.
• Allow users to upload images with their reviews. Reviews with photos convey more authenticity than those without.

Nearly one out of every five users abandon their online purchase because the checkout process is “too long or complicated.”

But research shows that it’s not the number of checkout steps that takes the greatest toll on users—it’s the number of form fields. Why? Users increasingly shop on phones where they struggle to navigate between mobile forms and inefficient keyboards.

Below are a few simple but effective tactics for minimizing the number of fields in the checkout process:

• Use a single “Full Name” field rather than separate “First” and “Last” names. Users tend to type their full name into the first name field anyway.
• Hide Address Line 2, Company, and Coupon fields behind a link. These fields generally apply only to a minority of customers.
• Use city and state auto-detection based on zip code. Besides reducing the number of necessary form fields, this auto-detection feature eliminates potential typos in city names and helps users avoid scrolling through long state drop-downs.
• Hide separate fields for billing address. By default, assume that customers’ shipping address is the same as their billing address. Provide a pre-checked checkbox (“My billing and delivery information are the same”) that users must uncheck to reveal separate billing address fields.
• Encourage users to create an account at the confirmation step—not at the beginning of the checkout process. Since they’ll have already filled out necessary user information in the earlier steps, creating a unique password won’t be so fatiguing. (Whereas if you nudge users to create an account at the beginning of the checkout flow, it feels like a tedious extra step.)

There's often a significant time delay between posting a new blog post and when it actually starts generating traffic.

But you can reduce this time by signaling to the search algorithm that a new page is high quality and should be indexed quickly.

A simple way to kickstart this process: Link to the new article from existing high traffic pages.

Here's how to quickly find high-quality opportunities for internal links:

1. Use Google to run a site search for the topic of your new article. In the search bar, type: site:yoursite.com "topic" For example: site:mparticle.com "data governance"
2. This query will return all pages on your site that have that keyword in them, ranked by relevance.
3. Open the first one in your CMS, quick-find the keyword using "control/command + F". Highlight the first time the keyword appears and hyperlink it to the new blog article.
4. Repeat this process for the top 10 internal pages that have this keyword.
5. Once all 10 internal backlinks are complete, go to Google Search Console and enter the URL of the new blog article. Under URL Inspection, click Request Indexing to ensure the page and associated links are crawled as soon as possible.

You can use this same process for content pillar pages that link to internal blog articles relevant to the keywords mentioned. Backlink hygiene helps search engines understand what your website is about and increases the likelihood that readers click through to multiple pages of your site.

Common belief: Pricing pages should be as simple as possible. No bells, no whistles, no anything that can draw attention away from the “buy” CTA.

But instead of thinking strictly about how much is on your page, think about how much value and friction each element adds.

• Value: Reaffirm that your product is worth buying. Overcome last-minute objections.
• Friction: Minimize confusion and distraction.

What that means in practice is that you can have more elements on your pricing page—as long as each one adds value and reduces friction.

Here are four that might fit the bill, depending on your product and audience:

• Live chat: Some companies only include live chat on their homepage or landing pages. But for high-priced items where customers might have questions before converting, we suggest testing live chat on product pages. You can instantly connect with prospects, resolve their final objections, and optimize your pricing based on the common questions you get asked.
• FAQs: Semrush’s pricing page helps prospects overcome common objections like levels of commitment (“can I cancel my subscription anytime?”) and investment (“what is Semrush’s refund policy?”) Google Workspace has a “Top Questions about Google Workspace Pricing” section on its product page, with questions about plans and users. If you’re aware that users are often struck with questions when they reach your product pages, don’t make them load another page to get those questions answered.
• Social proof: Testimonials, media mentions, or customer logos confirm that your brand is trustworthy and your product is popular. They often prove to be the tipping point for on-the-fence prospects.
• Word counts: Most companies keep their pricing page word count to 200-600 words. You should highlight your unique benefits and most valued features, but if your feature list is huge, consider linking to it instead of putting everything on your pricing page.

Dark mode is becoming more available across all apps, browsers, devices, and email inboxes.

Some surveys suggest that 90%+ of users prefer dark mode wherever it’s available. Even if the 90% is overestimated, it’s safe to say that a large percentage of users experience the internet through dark mode.

So if you’re designing ad creatives solely with light mode in mind, your ads’ CTRs might be taking a beating.

Why? Colors appear differently. With dark mode turned on, contrasting ads originally created for light mode may blend in.

To earn more users’ attention, consider designing and optimizing ad creatives for dark mode:

• Use a patterned or textured background to keep your ad from blending into the surrounding site.
• Choose a color other than black or white for your creative’s background; this will make it stand out in both light and dark mode.
• If you’re showing a product screenshot that blends into the surrounding site, consider adding a frame along the edges of the creative to make it stand out.
• Avoid using thin font weights, which are less readable against a dark background. (Visibility worsens when viewed in dark mode.)
• Create different versions of your existing ads to test colors opposite to those currently used.

Ambiguous delivery dates are a conversion killer for ecom companies.

Shoppers want to know exactly when they'll receive their order before purchasing.

So consider this simple tactic to increase conversion: Add estimated delivery dates to your product pages.

Estimated delivery dates satisfy shoppers' urge to know when they'll receive their orders, yet they're less often used by marketers.

If you have a Shopify site with a 2.0 theme, you can easily add estimated delivery dates to your product pages.

Go to Online Store > Themes > in your theme, click Customize. Open Product > Default Product (or a product template if you’re using one). Add a Custom Liquid section to your product page. Then copy this code and paste it into the Custom Liquid box.

Your delivery dates will update automatically.

Consumers shop differently around the holidays than they do during other times of the year.

Purchasing intent may be more focused on gifting—completely different than how they shop for themselves.

Given the difference in intent, consider tailoring your product copy during the holidays. Doing so can make your pitch more persuasive and increase conversions.

There are a few ways to go about this:

• Help customers envision how your product will bring joy as a gift. For example, you might include copy like “Show your partner how much you care with this deep-kneading shiatsu massager to soothe her back and neck tension.” The copy connects the dots for users by framing products they might not have even previously considered as potential gifts.
• Address concerns from other audience segments. This is especially effective for products that are more commonly given as gifts during the holiday season, like video games. Since parents and relatives may be more likely to purchase a video game than the actual game player, tackle the product from their perspective. Consider adding answers to questions like: what rating does it have? Why does it have that rating? What do other parents think of the game? The point is to reposition your products from the viewpoint of new consumers (gift givers).

Viral cycle time (VCT) is how long it takes a user to invite other users to a product.

It's a vital element of growth, even though it's not discussed nearly as often as viral coefficients (how many new users an average user brings in). To experience product-led growth, your VCT needs to compensate for churn.

TikTok has a short VCT. A daily user sees a great video > shares it > recipients become new users. Lower-frequency products tend to have longer VCTs. B2B enterprise products, for instance, typically take more time to get into, learn, and recommend.

Ignoring VCT is like ignoring your payback period when calculating annual revenue per user (ARPU). If it takes years for your product to make money, you’ll have slower growth than products with quicker earnings. (That’s why you should always factor your payback period into your ARPU:CAC ratio.)

VCT has an inverse relationship with engagement: The higher your engagement, the shorter your VCT. Two ways to factor this relationship into your product build:

1. Design your product so its content is meant to be shared on the spot—not bookmarked and saved for later. Examples: Spotify, social media platforms
2. Design your product so users can easily and immediately collaborate or transact with others, and that interaction makes their user experience better. Examples: Slack, Zoom

Note: Nir Eyal discussed VCT at our Growth Summit in November. You can watch his talk here and join the waitlist for the next one.

Most SEO marketers have been in this situation before:

You've tried just about everything to get a page to rank, yet nothing is working.

The problem might be your "semantic relevance" score. Google uses multiple algorithms to decide who to rank and who to tank. TF-IDF is the “relevance-scoring” algorithm used to measure language patterns and discern whose content does the best job of servicing the target keyword.

All things equal, pages with higher semantic relevance scores are rewarded with higher rankings.

If you've got pages that aren't ranking, consider these steps:

1. Download WebSite Auditor, which analyzes the semantic relevance of your competitors’ pages and compares them against your own
2. Install, and navigate to Content Analysis > TF-IDF
3. Copy and paste the laggard’s url and accompanying keyword(s)
4. Click “Run Audit”

When complete, you’ll see a full list of every relevant word and phrase missing from your content, along with recommendations for how to include them on the page.

Add all missing terms (there will likely be many), re-publish, and you're done.

We've seen sites climb to top positions using this simple method.

There are two drop-off points in every webinar funnel: registration and attendance.

When you promote a webinar through a partner's email list, you can increase the number of signups by around 40% using a clever one-click registration link: embed all the signup details into the link. You can do this with a third-party tool and by collaborating with your partner.

Here's how:

1. Sign up for One Click from Growth Tools (free)
2. Add your webinar details, partner email service, and success page URL
3. Click Create Link
4. Share the link with your webinar partner to use in promo emails

‍

Half a billion people visit the Apple app store each week. These are highly motivated customers looking for one thing: apps. That means unlike general query search engines like Google, the Apple app store caters to high-intent customers ready to download an app.

But because of the way Apple’s targeting options are structured, many marketers fail to get results. Apps need to get the ad group structure and targeting right to truly capitalize on the potential that Apple Search Ads offers.

Here’s one way to get results from Apple Search Ads.

Make three versions of all ad groups (each containing a specific set of keywords) targeting:

1. New users
2. Returning users
3. All users

You might wonder why you should target all users in a separate ad group since you’re already targeting new and returning users.

That’s due to a little-understood nuance of Apple Search Ads:

If you target ‘new’ users or ‘returning’ users (or if you layer on any targeting parameters like age, gender, or demographics), Apple excludes certain sensitive categories of users, like users under 18, those with accounts from educational institutions, and folks who’ve turned off ads personalization, among others. If you fail to target all users, you’d be missing a considerable audience.

Targeting these users obviously widens your reach. But more importantly, it results in stronger economics—since few advertisers target these users, the competition tends to be lower and the economics much stronger.

By targeting all users in addition to new and returning users, you’ll cast a wider net and likely see much stronger performance and lower costs.

Startups that run promotions for big, national holidays are often disappointed by results.

Most brands are running promotions at the same time, and they're crowded out.

Instead of launching promos on major holidays, consider creating a promo around an obscure holiday.

The less popular the holiday, the less competition for customers' attention. So your promotions actually stand out and drive action. Research shows that this approach can lift your promo conversion by as much as 25%.

The key: Identify a holiday that’s relevant to your product and build a story around it.

BarkBox turned an otherwise unknown holiday, National Squirrel Appreciation Day on January 21, into a viral social media campaign.